Bing is the successor to Microsoft‘s Live Search search engine and sees itself as a decision-making tool. Since entering the market in 2009, Bing has been trying to catch up with its superior competitor Google but has failed to gain more market share. The dominance of Google means that less attention is paid to Bing’s algorithm.
Live Search as the predecessor of Bing
Microsoft has long enjoyed security in the realm of the Internet. The reason for this was the great dominance of Internet Explorer as the most important web browser for a long time. However, this had the consequence that there was an underestimation in the area of search engines. This contempt, especially towards Google, meant that Microsoft was overtaken and almost completely replaced in the search engine sector.
Live Search was an attempt to create a peer search engine. However, this met with little approval. Therefore, a new search engine Bing was developed, which should lead to a higher reputation and more market share among users through many innovations. To ensure success, Microsoft hired some former employees of Yahoo hired.
Functions
Microsoft has changed some aspects of Bing compared to its predecessor, Live Search, to provide better search results and increase user popularity. At first glance, Bing stands out with a high-resolution background image that appears anew every day. In addition, the search function has been improved, making it easier for the user to find images and videos. If he selects an image and moves the mouse over it, he gets the Bing Document Preview, which means that the image is enlarged and properties such as size and source are specified. In the display of the videos, sorting can also be carried out in the search results, such as by size, colour or layout.
Internet shopping is made easier by integrating Ciao! for Bing enabled. By selecting the Shopping category, the user is automatically redirected to Ciao! forwarded and a variety of Internet pages will be displayed to him.
With the Bing Webmaster Tools, Microsoft provides its users with even more functions.
Market Share of Search Engines 2012
Market share in Germany: as of March 2012
Google 95.9%
Google 1.1%
Yahoo 0.9%
Market shares USA: as of 08.2012
Google 65.1%
Yahoo 16.3%
Google 14.7%
Ask.com 3.0%
AOL 1.3%
Market Share of Search Engines 2014
Market share Germany: as of 09.2014 [1]
Google 94.87%
Google 2.51%
Yahoo 2.02%
Market shares USA: Status 07.2014 [2]
Google 67.4%
Yahoo 19.3%
Google 10.0%
Ask.com 2.0%
AOL 1.3%
Market Trend
In England, Bing was able to credit an increase of 0.72 percentage points in October 2012 compared to the previous month and thus achieve a market share of 4.71%. Google slipped below the 90% mark for the first time in 5 years. A clear development in favour of Microsoft’s search engine cannot be predicted, but in the course of the cooperation with Facebook and the forthcoming sale of Windows 8 tablets, an increase in popularity was also to be expected in Europe.
Bing also played a rather marginal role in the European search engine market in 2014, far behind Google, which has a market share of more than 90% in the European countries with the most Internet use, apart from the Czech Republic. [3]
Bing has seen slight growth in the US since 2011. The market share has meanwhile been increased to almost 20%. (Status: July 2014) This means that Bing has overtaken its direct competitor Yahoo at the same time. [4]
Quality of search results
Even if the research department of Bing does not want to admit any disadvantages in terms of the quality of their search results, a lower number of hits after a search cannot be disputed. Although this does not say anything directly about the quality of the hits, it does suggest weaknesses. Since Microsoft is also aware of the fact that their search engine is said to have lower quality results, and this ultimately prevents it from connecting to the dominant search engine Google, an attempt was made to clear up this prejudice. Until October 18, 2012, interested parties had the opportunity to convince themselves of the relevance of the Bing results on the website www.bingiton.com. After entering random search terms, the test subjects were able to choose from two search results, one each from Bing and Google, and choose the more appealing one. The test person was not familiar with the origin of the hits. The person was then confronted with the sometimes surprising result. With this campaign, Bing wanted to improve its image and also make it clear that the market can also offer alternatives to Google.
Conflicts between Bing and Google
In February 2011, Google noticed inexplicable parallels between its search results and those from Bing. They then confront the competitor with the accusation that its search results are not the result of a complicated algorithm but copy the results from Google. Google employees were working on automatically correcting typos in search terms when they found that Bing returned the same results after entering random letters as Google’s search engine did after its auto-correction. According to Google, this could only be a copy, since a common result after entering a term like “rpxrnty” could not just be a coincidence. Bing denies this and explains the common results through anonymous user data such as clicked links.